We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for…a RANT!

We’ve had this blog up and running for over a year now and we’ve never once (at least as far as we can recall) gone off topic. At least not too far. Until now. Please forgive us, but we’re feeling a bit frustrated, annoyed, taken advantage of and any other such synonyms and we’ve got to get some things off our chest. If you’d rather not read all about it, stop now and we promise to get back to writing about wine, Napa and other happy related-topics soon!

[Begin rant]

A little over a month ago we were involved in a little bit of a car accident–not our fault, we were rear-ended as we made the trek home from work. Thankfully, no one was hurt, and Baby Aidan was not in the car at the time. Great. Being involved in a car accident, no matter how minor, is never an enjoyable experience. Even less enjoyable is the process that follows. Insurance companies, claims, paperwork, auto body shops, more paperwork, rental cars, etc. It’s gotta be one of the most painful processes to go through as a consumer. At every step, it almost seems like the processes set in place are there to trip you up, cost you money and otherwise make you abort the entire process.

As a consumer, particularly one with little-to-no knowledge of medical or auto-mechanical information, going to the doctor and the auto mechanic are two of the most helpless activities we can imagine. If a doctor says there’s something wrong with your heart, for example, how can you argue with that? Sure, you can get a second opinion, and a third and a fourth, but at some point, you’re going to have to TRUST what the doctor(s) tells you and make a decision on how to proceed. Same thing goes with a visit to the mechanic.

So after getting our car into a local, recommended auto body shop (we’re not even going to give them a link, they’re that bad) for repair the day following our accident, we went on our merry way, paperwork in hand and fully expecting to have our car back in early March. Well, guess what? Tomorrow is March 20th and we still don’t have our car back. What’s worse? The day our car was scheduled to be completed and returned to us, we never even so-much as heard from said auto body shop. Nor did we hear from them the next day. Obviously not good news. Two days after we should have had our car back, we called to find out what was up. We’ll spare you the rest of the gory details, but put it this way–we’ve now been told, EVERY DAY FOR A WEEK, that our car will be ready “tomorrow”. Then, when tomorrow comes and nearly goes, we have to call and ask if the car will indeed be done as promised. Invariably, the answer is no, it’ll be ready tomorrow.

The most frustrating thing, aside from repeated lies and a lack of communication from a supposed customer service business? It’s the fact that we, as a consumer, have very little, if any recourse in said situation. We’ve called and complained to the manager, we’ve documented our trials and tribulations in writing to the owner. The response? Blame on every other vendor or company tangentially involved in the repair of our vehicle. Ridiculous. We’ll most certainly be filing something with the BBB, but have very little faith that will result in anything positive. And we still don’t have our car. Perhaps we should be more green and just go buy a bike.

Few, well, we feel a LITTLE bit better now. Thanks for obliging…

[End rant]

[techtags: Napa, Napa Valley]

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Trevor was born and aged in the Napa Valley and has a passion for wine, writing and social media, which led him to co-found this blog in early 2007. Follow him on Twitter and Google+.